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A Mouse’s Guide to Personal Happiness

The first part of my squeaky guide to personal happiness is all about genuinely and authentically DEALING WITH YOUR PAST. In order to deal with your past you have to confront the paradox that to deal with your past you must recognise that you can’t deal with your past. The past cannot be “DEALT WITH”. You cannot reverse-strategise your history.

Of course, you can rewrite it in a way that suppresses what really happened. You can pretend that the traumatic time you spent as a mouse-baby in a horrific trap where your tail was caught was simply something you did as a dare, but it will never really convince you or others at a deep intuitive level, when the truth was you were being greedy and after guzzling your 15th piece of cheese that day.

You can harvest learning from your past – you can learn lessons from it and build those lessons into resolutions for present and future behaviour that is focused on being happier. You can say “I was a greedy fool and I need to realise that I can enjoy the food I have and be careful when I am hungry, and not let my greed run away with my tail”. You might even resolve to move out of your current mousehole and go live in a nice cheese factory. It requires neither praise nor self-damning. It requires truth and honesty turned into resolution and action.

If you reach too far back into the past you may fall over backwards. If you don’t reach back far enough, you won’t gather enough learning momentum to leap into the future.

Harvesting your past involves letting go of the crap after learning lessons from it and making resolutions and also taking any of the good stuff with you to ensure you can build on it in the future. Most of all though, it involves realising that past fears cloak themselves in ghostly forms and it is ok to be aware of that and honest about it. For many years, unless you look at it very honestly, the pretty lampshade may hold terror for you because it has the similar shape to that damn mousetrap.

You might have to force yourself to stand under a lot of lampshades before you banish that ghost! You might have to get rid of your greed or at least channel it into something more positive such as replacing the constant cheese snacking with some good conversation and a regular cheese banquet which celebrates your love of it in a more open and gorgeous way.